Associate each characteristic below with one group or the other. In their book Born Digital, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser discuss types of people they call
digital natives
and digital immigrants.
What would linguistic anthropologists label new words that have emerged during the digital age such as a mouse modem download and tweet?
What would linguistic anthropologists label new words that have emerged during the digital age, such as mouse, modem, download and tweet?
focal
.
What term do anthropologists use to refer to small units of sound that can make a critical difference in meaning within a language but do not have any meaning on their own?
Human language utilizes sounds, gestures, and ________. … What term do anthropologists use to refer to small units of sounds that make a critical difference in meaning within a language?
Phonemes
. What do we call the system of human communication based on a set of symbols and signs with learned and shared meanings?
What do linguists call small units of sound that carry meaning on their own?
A phoneme
is the smallest unit of sound that may cause a change of meaning within a language but that doesn’t have meaning by itself. A morpheme is the smallest unit of a word that provides a specific meaning to a string of letters (which is called a phoneme).
What do we call the system of human communication based on a set of symbols?
Language
, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves.
How words fit together to make meaningful units is called?
How words fit together to make meaningful units is called.
morphology
. The study of grammatical categories, such as tense and word order, is called. morphology.
What is the best example of a dialect?
- A Northern American might say, “hello.”
- A Southern American might say, “howdy.”
- This is an example of the differences in dialect.
What would linguistic anthropologists label new words that have emerged during?
Linguistic anthropologists would label them “
Focal”
.
What does the term language continuum refer to group of answer choices?
Language continuum. The
idea that variation in languages appears gradually over distance so that groups of people who live near one another speak in a way that is mutually intelligible
.
Why do linguistic anthropologists study the patterns and important sounds spoken by a group of people group of answer choices?
According to the text, studying the patterns and importance of sounds as spoken by a group of people helps linguistic anthropologists:
understand the elements and rules of a particular language
. they essentially grow up in different linguistic worlds.
What is the most obvious aspect of language?
The most obvious aspect of language is
speech
. Speech is not essential to the definition of an infinitely productive communication system, such as is constituted by a language.
What are the smallest units of meaning in a language?
The Morpheme
is the smallest unit of a language that can carry meaning.
What are the 5 components of language?
Linguists have identified five basic components (
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
) found across languages.
What is the one thing all languages have?
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have
nouns and verbs
, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.
What are arbitrary signs?
Symbolic (arbitrary) signs:
signs where the relation between signifier and signified is purely conventional and culturally specific
, e.g., most words. Iconic signs: signs where the signifier resembles the signified, e.g., a picture.
Do humans use call systems?
(Jared Diamond 1991:130) Humans still have
the old innate call system
, existing alongside language. Sounds like laughter and screams are controlled by the older neural (subcortical) structures in the brain, which are also responsible for the call systems of other species.
